Fresno sees biggest one-day COVID spike since January. See what the surge looks like
.JPG "A vaccination tech draws a syringe of the Pfizer vaccine, as California Surgeon General, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris (second from right) is briefed upon her visit to the Covid-19 vaccination clinic at the Kerman Community Center, June 9, 2021.")
Fresno County and state health officials reported almost 1,300 new laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infections on Wednesday – the largest one-day spike in cases since mid-January.
The 1,288 cases posted Wednesday morning to the Fresno County Department of Public Health’s data page were actually from Tuesday, the last day of August.
In addition to those new cases, the county also reported 11 additional deaths attributed to the coronavirus.
The additional cases and fatalities bring Fresno County’s totals for the 18-month-old pandemic to 117,155 people who, at some point, have contracted the virus. The newly-acknowledged fatalities have pushed the county’s death toll to 1,801.
Over the course of the past seven days, 4,131 new cases and 40 deaths from COVID-19 have been reported in Fresno County. That’s a seven-day average of 590 new cases per day countywide, or more than 57 per day as a rate of new cases per 100,000 residents. Both the seven-day average and the new-case rate are the highest since January, amid a winter surge in December and January in which as many as 2,700 or more cases were reported on some days.
The summer surge that began in July and has continued into September coincides with a dramatic increase in the prevalence of the highly contagious delta variant, a strain that was first identified in India last fall. Since that time, it has quickly traveled around the world and become the dominant variant in California and the U.S.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimates that nationwide, the delta variant was responsible for more than 99% of all new coronavirus cases reported over the two-week period ending Aug. 21.
More than 98% of the positive COVID-19 tests processed in August in California and submitted for genomic sequencing were associated with the delta variant, according to the state Department of Public Health.
